Founded 1985 · Twycross, Leicestershire, England · Founders: Tim Stamper,Chris Stamper · First game: Jetpac (1983, as Ultimate Play the Game)
Rare was founded by brothers Tim and Chris Stamper, who taught themselves machine-code programming in a farmhouse in rural Leicestershire and built a game empire from scratch before Nintendo came to them.
Tim and Chris Stamper grew up in the English Midlands and taught themselves assembly language programming on early home computers in the early 1980s. In 1982, operating as Ultimate Play the Game from their family home, they produced Jetpac for the ZX Spectrum — a game of such technical polish that it sold over 300,000 copies and established Ultimate as the most respected British software house of the 8-bit era. Games like Sabre Wulf, Atic Atac, and Knight Lore (which pioneered isometric 3D graphics in 1984) followed in rapid succession. The brothers renamed their company Rare Ltd in 1985 when they pivoted toward Nintendo hardware, reportedly having reverse-engineered the NES at a time when Nintendo was not licensing to British developers. Nintendo was so impressed by the demonstration of technical competence that they granted Rare one of only a handful of "second-party" development licences, allowing the company to produce ten NES game releases per year — a quota exceeded by no other non-Japanese developer. The farmhouse studio that produced Donkey Kong Country (1994) and GoldenEye 007 (1997) never lost the ethos of two brothers working obsessively alone.
Before Rare existed there was Ultimate Play the Game, and before Ultimate there were just two brothers in a house in Leicestershire with a ZX Spectrum and an obsessive commitment to technical excellence. Tim and Chris Stamper were not hobbyists who stumbled into commercial success — they were methodical engineers who identified what current Spectrum games lacked and systematically provided it. Jetpac (1983) moved at a speed and smoothness that no other Spectrum game had achieved; Sabre Wulf (1984) created a scrolling jungle world with more enemies on screen simultaneously than players believed the hardware could handle. The brothers wrote their own assemblers, their own level editors, their own compression routines. They shared no code, accepted no publishing deals from others, and released no information about how any of it worked.
Knight Lore (1984) was the demonstration that the Stampers were operating at a different level from any British software house of the era. An isometric 3D game on 8-bit hardware — with a day-night cycle, object puzzles, and a cauldron mechanic — Knight Lore predated nearly every other isometric game by years. Ultimate held it back for months after completion, reportedly to avoid cannibalising sales of their existing catalogue. When it launched it was so far ahead of anything else on the platform that competitors spent years attempting to match it. The reputation built by Ultimate gave the Stampers the credibility to approach Nintendo directly.
The Stampers' approach to Nintendo was characteristic of their method: rather than apply through formal channels, they reverse-engineered the Famicom hardware and produced demonstration software that proved they understood the machine at a lower level than most licensed Japanese developers. Nintendo, which had maintained extremely tight control over Western licensing, was sufficiently impressed to grant Rare a development relationship that gave them unmatched creative and commercial flexibility. The resulting NES output — RC Pro-Am, Battletoads, Rare's versions of several Acclaim sports titles — was technically superior to most NES software and confirmed the studio's standing.
The SNES era brought Rare's most celebrated work: Donkey Kong Country (1994) used Silicon Graphics workstations to pre-render 3D character models as SNES sprites, producing visuals that seemed impossible on the hardware and shifted the entire industry's aesthetic expectations for 16-bit console games. GoldenEye 007 (1997) redefined what a first-person shooter could be on a console. Banjo-Kazooie (1998) and Perfect Dark (2000) followed. Through all of it, the studio remained in the same Leicestershire location — a converted farmhouse in a village of a few hundred people — an incongruity that visitors invariably remarked upon. Microsoft's £375 million acquisition in 2002 ended the Nintendo partnership but not the studio, which continues to operate from the same address.